By |June 23, 2013

Hundreds of crimes in Denver were not included in FBI statistics last year largely because of officer error and software glitches, police officials acknowledged to the Denver Post. As police dig further into how those mistakes happened, high on their list of unanswered questions is why 25 percent of the homicides in 2012 are not reflected in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, an important tool in examining overall crime trends nationally. The Post reported earlier that discrepancies between Rap Sheet Blog, the FBI and department data are vast.

While the FBI report says violent crime in Denver fell 3.6 percent in 2012 from the year before — to 3,584 from 3,718 — data provided by the police department show a 9.3 percent increase from 3,810 violent crimes in 2011 to 4,163 last year. The FBI numbers indicate a nearly 4 percent drop in aggravated assaults, yet Denver police show an 11 percent increase from 2011 to last year. There were 38 killings in the city in 2012, according to the police department’s data, and 28 by the FBI’s count. FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer said that if a law enforcement agency’s data does not pass “edit checks,” it sends the agency an error report for review. The numbers released this month are preliminary; a final report on crime in 2012 is due out later this year.

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